Billionaires and transportation toys

Stodgy world of planes, trains and automobiles, meet the billionaires with “Star Trek” dreams.

Technology moguls are brimming with ideas for bringing flying robots, self-driving cars, people-moving tubes and space-traveling tourists to the sleepy realm of transportation, which hasn’t seen a major shakeup in decades.

But the people who changed the way you shop, send money and search for information are finding it won’t be as easy to change the way you drive, ride and fly.

They’re confronting a transportation sector where public investments are drying up, engineers complain about crumbling roads and bridges and it’s been ages since government initiatives created the likes of the Interstate Highway System. So the billionaires are trying to adapt their shared disrupt-or-die ethos to an industry marked by an obsession with safety, heavy regulations and a fear of failure.

If they succeed, these tycoons would go down in the history books not just next to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs but also alongside Henry Ford and the Wright brothers. But their visions vary wildly in their practicality — self-driving cars could be on the road as soon as 2020, while Musk’s Hyperloop is a pie-in-the-sky proposal that may never move beyond the idea stage.

“You clearly have got companies that are in it to disrupt the space,” said Scott Belcher, president of the Intelligent Transportation Society of America, a trade group that works at the intersection of technology and transportation. “They don’t want to get dragged down by the government or by the traditional provider.”

But he warned that no single company can single-handedly transform transportation.

Here’s a look at how each of the billionaires’ ideas may fare:

1) Amazon’s drones

Bezos’s announcement Sunday that Amazon hopes to use drones to deliver smaller packages in the next “four, five years” generated a wave of both gee-whiz headlines and skepticism. The FAA has been noncommittal about Bezos’s plan, and even industry backers said the technology needs to improve before drones can deliver DVDs and dresses to people’s front doors.

But Bezos was clearly reveling in the space-age nature of his plan when he revealed it to Charlie Rose on “60 Minutes.”

“I know this looks like science fiction,” he said. “It’s not.”

Deploying the drones would create a major challenge to UPS, FedEx, the Postal Service and other dominant “last-mile” shippers.

Amazon seems to know it will have to persuade the FAA to change its regulatory roadmap, which for now doesn’t include allowing the pilot-less autonomous drones that Bezos’s ideas depend on. The FAA confirmed to POLITICO that Bezos had reached out to safety regulators before Sunday’s announcement, and it’s unlikely Amazon will remain quiet.

How likely? It’ll happen, but Bezos will need cooperation from the FAA and local governments to meet an ambitious timeline.

2) Musk’s Hyperloop

Frustration with the delays and high costs plaguing California’s $68 billion high-speed rail project led Musk to seek an alternative.

“How could it be that the home of Silicon Valley and JPL — doing incredible things like indexing all the world’s knowledge and putting rovers on Mars — would build a bullet train that is both one of the most expensive per mile and one of the slowest in the world?” Musk wrote in a blog post introducing his idea in August.

What he came up with was as bizarre as it was futuristic: He wants to enclose people in aluminum pods and shoot them in a steel tube at speeds exceeding 700 mph, allowing them to travel from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 35 minutes. Engineers have said Musk’s plan would work — at least on paper. But not even Musk was willing to put up the money to make it a reality.

The lack of interest in constructing a Hyperloop points to a second major difference between Silicon Valley and the transportation world: Major infrastructure projects can’t be coded in a dorm room or a garage. Musk said constructing the Hyperloop would cost $10 billion — a fraction of the high-speed rail plan’s cost — but critics said the amount relies on savings that would never materialize in the real world.